


Taste the Sky and Feel Alive

by storytellerontheside



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Becoming a Fear Entity Avatar (The Magnus Archives), Canon-Typical The Vast Content (The Magnus Archives), Happy Ending, Hurt/Comfort, I just think the vast is neat okay, M/M, Peter Lukas did not plan for this, Pining, The Lonely Fear Domain (The Magnus Archives), The Vast Fear Domain (The Magnus Archives), The Vast is pretty, Vast Avatar Martin Blackwood, gratuitous descriptions of the endless sky, post-season 3, vast!Martin
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-25
Updated: 2020-12-07
Packaged: 2021-03-10 01:36:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 11,046
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27705658
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/storytellerontheside/pseuds/storytellerontheside
Summary: Peter Lukas sent Martin out on the Tundra to learn the true meaning of isolation. He never imagined he would fall in love with the ocean instead.
Relationships: Martin Blackwood/Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist
Comments: 31
Kudos: 160





	1. Darling I Wish You Were Here

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Heads up for canon-typical Vastness, as well as canon-typical Loneliness. More detailed descriptions and TWs in the end notes (includes spoilers).  
> Title taken from the song Vanilla Twilight by Owl City. I listened to it a lot while writing this and I'm pretty sure it shows.

Martin liked to think he wasn’t a violent person by nature. _Protective_ , certainly. Strong enough to do what needed to be done to keep the others safe, he hoped. Standing next to the likes of Melanie, however, he couldn’t see himself ever tapping into the raw anger that poured off her in waves.

For all he hated Elias, he found it hard to imagine just…letting loose the way he knew the others might. Beating him bloody with anything on hand, turning on him the same way he once turned on Leitner and splitting his skull as recompense for all the manipulating and entrapping and _murdering_.

Melanie never fumbled with weapons when she turned her sights on the things that infiltrated the archives. Screaming bloody murder, she cut and slashed and stabbed and sliced until it seemed as natural as breathing to see her hand curled around the hilt of a knife. Sudden, bloody, brutal.

Talking to Peter Lukas, Martin could _almost_ understand the appeal of following the path of a violent god.

“But what am I supposed to _do?_ ”

“Think of it as…a vacation,” Peter suggested. His polite smile couldn’t hide the fact that he gritted his teeth through every strained word.

“While the others are still stuck in the archives.”

“You need to let go of your attachments, Martin.”

“I’m doing this _because_ I want to protect them. How am I supposed to keep going if I forget why I’m doing all this in the first place?”

“Don’t worry about all that. There won’t be anywhere to escape _to_ once you’re on the Tundra.”

“That’s really reassuring,” Martin deadpanned.

“Reassurance…isn’t one of my strong suits. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have things to do.”

“But you didn’t answer my—” Too late.

Martin glared at the empty space that Peter occupied not a second before and hoped the man could still see it.

The Tundra was somehow smaller than he’d expected it to be. Of course, it was still easily the biggest boat he’d ever seen in person, but once on board he began to realise how little _space_ there really was. The rooms were cramped, pressed so close together it came closer to claustrophobia than “the spirit of true loneliness.” Only after they set sail did he begin to develop a new understanding of the nature of his voyage.

Being alone while surrounded by people was a unique form of torture he’d never fully appreciated before. Even in the archives, surrounded by people a misstep away from tearing out one another’s throats, at least he had the luxury of small talk. Shared smiles with the barista in the cafeteria, inside jokes with Rosie on the nights he left through the front doors instead of camping out in storage. The crew of the Tundra gave him a wide berth, never offering much more than a stiff nod when he muttered apologies for bumping into someone, or thanks when they served him food in the mess hall.

Talking was a habit Peter assured him he would break eventually, but privately Martin suspected he would forget his own name before he dropped the manners his mother instilled in him so deeply.

What bothered him more than the solitude was the boredom. The first week wasn’t so bad, with a whole ship to explore and a backpack of books to occupy his time, but the inevitability of it weighed on him heavily as the narrow corridors cemented themselves in his mind. By the second week, he knew them too well to become lost in the bowels of the ship. By the third, he’d begun to loathe the slate-grey of the walls.

It wouldn’t have been so bad if he’d been allowed to keep his phone. At least then he would have been able to scroll through his Instagram feed and take comfort in the endless supply of dog photos at his fingertips when he grew restless. Maybe it would have helped to play games when his mind grew foggy from the under stimulated, or even simply to be reminded that life outside the confines of the Tundra continued to _exist_.

Even without the warm comfort of a familiar voice on the other end of the phone, he would have given anything just to be able to flick through his photo gallery again. Refresh the details the clammy fog seemed determined to blur.

Of course, that was the point of this whole exercise, wasn’t it?

_Refreshing the details would defeat the point of this, Martin._

_Reminding yourself of your attachments won’t help you let go of them, Martin._

_I want you to_ slowly drive yourself insane with boredom _, Martin_.

Amazing how quickly he’d grown to loathe the voice of a man who hardly ever spoke.

The one thing Peter hadn’t seen a reason to try and pry away from him was his love of poetry. Either because he didn’t know, didn’t care, or genuinely saw no reason to make Martin give up a primarily solitary hobby. Regardless, his writing soon became his sole refuge in the drab and painfully mundane routine he’d found himself trapped in.

While the members of the crew worked themselves to the bone finding ways to occupy their every waking moment, Martin poured over the collections he’d carefully selected for the trip and toyed with the blank pages of his notebooks. He’d packed plenty, so supplies weren’t an issue so much as _inspiration_.

No TV to distract himself when he got stuck, no internet to hunt for the word balanced on the tip of his tongue, no headphones to listen to his favourite soothing soundscapes. Just the aching embrace of his self-imposed solitude, without so much as a comforting word to break the weeks of pained silence.

What he _did_ have, and what even Peter Lukas wouldn’t dream of taking away from him, was the ocean.

The visceral fear of losing his only source of refuge made him reluctant to take his notebook up to the top deck where it would be exposed and in plain view of the sunken, haunted eyes of the ship’s crew. It didn’t stop him from spending hours up there, searching for the right words to describe the peaks of the perfect blue waves.

Martin remembered Jon mentioning that he grew up in Bournemouth, never more than a short drive away from the ocean. Leaning over the railing, he tried to imagine what Jon would think of the breath taking view stretching out in every direction. Did he even _like_ the sea? Or did his nostalgia for his childhood end with the gritty, coarse sand he would inevitably track back home after a trip to the beach?

Had he ever been on a boat before? Or, like Martin, would he find the Tundra strangely alien? What would he make of Peter Lukas? Of Martin leaving the archives to pledge himself to one of the entities?

It _hurt_ that he could only speculate, the gaps in his knowledge gaping and unfillable.

Somewhere in a world far removed from his own, Jon lay motionless in a hospital bed without even the rise and fall of his chest to offer the illusion of life. Martin wished he knew which direction to look back in, but they’d been surrounded by empty ocean so long he couldn’t even hazard a guess. Perhaps there _was_ no direction, only a place where the Tundra existed and a place where it did not.

Sometimes he liked to guess how many kilometres separated him from the hospital bed. When they first departed, he’d marvelled at how the Tundra effortlessly outpaced the surrounding vessels. Looming over them all as it carved its path out of the port. Out in the open water, without fixed landmarks around to offer a sense of relative space, it slowed to an agonised crawl. No end in sight, no indication of any form of life beyond the distant horizon. Nothing at all, beyond the endless sprawling sea.

It helped to think of their distance as a physical, measurable thing. Something that could be mapped and charted if you knew the way. Given the right knowledge and the right tools, he could navigate all the way back to the archives where Jon would no doubt be waiting to lecture him on taking a leave of absence from work without informing him.

At some point, the layer of thin mist settling over the water became a more immoveable barrier than the physical distance. Unable to shake the chill creeping under his skin, he found himself thinking more about how cold Jon would be when he woke up. Even _with_ a functioning heart, he remembered the muttered comments about the stiffening joints in his hands when the chill invaded the normally sweltering archives in the winter.

Jon never turned down an offer of tea, even if only to hold the mug for warmth as he read his statements. After realising this, Martin stopped being put off when he poured their contents down the drain a few hours later. Realised for the first time that, for all the snarky comments he made, Jon never once asked him to stop.

He wondered if Jon was aware of the cold as his eyes darted back and forth behind closed eyelids, tracking horrors Martin couldn’t see. It would be kinder if he didn’t, but his god didn’t care much for acts of kindness.

Martin knew he needed to let go of Jon eventually. To focus his attention on protecting those who still remained in the land of the living. And to protect the people left, he needed power. To _obtain_ power, he needed Peter Lukas, and for that he needed to succumb to the Lonely.

So, Martin stopped looking in what he imagined was the direction of a distant landmass and focused on his real reason for being there.

Losing himself in the solitude was…more difficult than he anticipated. The loss and sorrow made it easier to wallow, but the cramped quarters and lack of direction made him restless. He never expected to _miss_ separating jumbled statements or tracking down the many misfiled ones in the labyrinth of shelves that made up archival storage, but the lack of stimulation made him more irritated than melancholic.

He tried thinking Lonely thoughts, an easy enough rabbit hole to get lost down, but after a few hours something would inevitably shake him from his dazed state, and he’d be back to fighting to offset the crawling need to _do_ something.

Given a shred of self-confidence, he may have taken up jogging like some of the crewmates, but he saw little appeal in running laps around the deck, and even less in joining their silent march.

Instead, Martin threw himself whole-heartedly into the task of trying to describe the ocean.

He expected the challenge to lose some of its appeal after a few weeks out at sea, but even as the numbness of the fog crept in, the sight of the endless waves never lost its novelty. Growing up in a densely packed city, he found it hard to explain the feeling that incredible, _inescapable_ emptiness brought him. The awe mingling with a visceral terror as he imagined a sudden lurch hurling him over the railing and into the churning waves.

How long would it take for the ship to vanish over the distant horizon-line? It may seem to trail lazily across the waves, but he knew it would look quite different from the perspective of someone watching their only hope of salvation vanish. Even the trail it left in the upset water would fade soon enough, leaving no indication they’d ever been there at all.

Martin supposed he might be able to last a while in those waters if he were equipped with a life jacket, but if the ship never came back for him, what then? Would it be the cold that killed him? Or would he have to wait for dehydration to do the job? Could he hold out for a whole day? Two? Three?

_Would it matter?_ Martin thought numbly as he leaned over the railing to watch the sharp peak of the boat stir white sea foam in the still waters. _What are a few days worth when it would take me_ years _to swim to shore?_

These thoughts made him feel very small in the face of the ocean’s enormity, and he supposed that must be a good sign. What could be more lonely than the prospect of an inevitable end, alone in the endless waves with only the stars to keep him company as he came to terms with his fate?

The sunset became a rare constant to separate the days, and his nightly ritual of wandering onto the deck after dinner to watch it became a grounding routine. Some nights he even brought his notebook, and while the crew ate in silence below he wrote about the fading rays splashing smudges of red across the cloudless sky, content in the knowledge that the Lonely would never sap the colour from the sunset the way it did from people. It helped to know that some things were still sacred, untouched by the dread power they served.

He was wrong, of course.

The thin sheen of fog that lingered in the air around the lone ship grew dense as they charged onwards. Martin suspected it was less a matter of drawing closer to something so much as leaving something else behind, leaving _everything_ behind. The dense filter dimmed its brightness with every passing day, and at once his nights of watching the sun set from the quiet deck became painstakingly numbered.

He could only watch with mournful eyes as the sheet of grey dulled the vivid colours streaked across the sky. It curled around the hull in a cold embrace, growing in the vacant corners until it spilled over and took its root in the bowels of the ship. He saw it in the air he exhaled, how his breath hung in the air a little longer than it should have. A little lazier, unhurried as it grew reacquainted with the mist seeping in through the walls.

Despite being surrounded by water, the ship had always felt dry, though never quite warm enough to fully alleviate the lingering chill. Now the air tasted damp, its icy tendrils snaking down his throat and coiling in the lining of his lungs and still it didn’t stop spreading. Hiding in the soft marrow of his bones, freezing his blood as its creeping march pressed on.

The irrationally rational part of him clung to the notion that it made _sense_. They must be headed north, of course the nights would get colder. Martin needed to get ahold of himself, stop personifying a natural phenomenon. Fog couldn’t be _malicious_.

But this fog was, and in the depths of his sluggish heart he knew that it would hollow him out until all that would be left was a cold and empty skin. Would he even remember who he’d been before? Or would the hollow ache serve as his only reminder that he’d once been _whole?_

He barely noticed the crewmates anymore, just tricks of the light that walked and moved, and on the rarest occasion spoke. To instruct, to ask questions that couldn’t go unasked, to say anything that needed to be said and offered no sense of connection.

When he lost sight of the distant horizon, Martin closed his eyes and searched for the right words to describe the sound of the waves lapping at the metal of the ship. After weeks (months?) of staring out at the ocean, it was easy to summon the visual to match.

He realised with a start that the steady rhythm still shifted as if to match the changing weather conditions. He never saw any sign of change beyond the constant fog, but the harsh slap of water against metal told him plainly when the weather turned the waves choppy.

He couldn’t see the sunset anymore, but the mist didn’t reach high enough to block out the stars.

Forgetting the crew entirely, Martin started lying on the deck at night. If he slept at all, he dreamed of the same sky he saw when he was awake. Perhaps he learned to doze with his eyes cracked open, or maybe the stars painted themselves against the backs of his eyelids to keep him company.

The stars were his favourite, of course. Perhaps the only silver lining to this whole miserable trip. Without the London light pollution, he could _see_ them. More than he ever thought possible, more than he ever knew could be _seen_. It boggled his mind to think that every distant pinprick as a star, every bit as bright and searing as their own sun. So _many_ , farther away than his mind could possibly comprehend.

So much farther than he could possibly travel in a thousand lifetimes, yet their brightness reached him even here. Penetrating the impassable fog and the threat of endless solitude to reassure him on the long nights spent alone. He’d read somewhere that it took light _years_ to travel between the stars and the Earth. Decades, centuries, _millennia_. Numbers he’d seen written down but never truly comprehended before, and he wondered why they’d never seemed worth thinking about.

The hugeness of it made him want to scream, but who would hear it? Who would _care?_ Tears rolled off his cheeks to splatter against the deck, indistinguishable from the splashes of sea spray. If he leaned over the railing, they’d drip all the way down to the waters far below. His misery would be just another drop in the ocean, and the thought made him want to laugh so hysterically that more tears would join the first. No matter, of course. If he rang every drop of moisture from his body, it still wouldn’t amount to anything more than a pinprick in the face of the ocean’s immense vastness.

Such a lonely thought, but somehow it didn’t feel the same as the aching chill of the mist. The ocean didn’t care about his solitude or his sadness. Wouldn’t even notice if it swept him out of sight of the Tundra. The fog drank in his suffering and threatened to strangle him with its creeping tendrils. It would separate him, leave him to wither where there could be no hope of salvation…but the ocean would kill him out of sheer uncaring. A bacterium at the mercy of disinfectant, so miniscule he could only be worth a passing thought as part of a collective.

He wondered if the Tundra counted as that collective but dismissed the thought out of hand. How many ships sailed these oceans every day? Every year? Spanning across the centuries, would a thousand legions of fishermen and soldiers and saviours and destroyers be worth noticing? Would all the people on all the lands it touched?

_Why call it Earth at all when it’s so much more water than land?_

He didn’t know the answer but looking up he knew the stars cared even less. It would be a thousand years before the sight of him could reach them, and he’d be long dead before they decided if he was worth looking back at.

Martin either didn’t notice or didn’t _care_ to notice the night the crew of the Tundra roused from their slumber. Awaking one by one to gather on the deck, more mist than men as they stepped aboard their lifeboat without ever exchanging a word. Had he turned his head to watch them go, he would have caught a few of them staring at him. The ones with a semblance of colour in their cheeks, and an alertness burning through the feverish glaze in their eyes.

But he didn’t, and the crew of the Tundra rowed their tiny lifeboat out into the still waters (yes, still tonight. The waves hardly made a sound as they lapped at the hull). The fog pressed closer. Cold enough to freeze his blood solid in his veins and thick enough to choke him if the sight of the stars hadn’t already stolen the breath from his lungs.

The more he tried to wrap his mind around them, around the sheer _quantity_ of them, the more they seemed to multiply until at last he swore there were more stars than black sky between them. He wondered how he could ever have believed the creeping fog would block out a sight so impossible and bright that it cut through his closed eyelids when he tried to blink in the face of their brilliance. It sounded positively _absurd_.

It proved him wrong again, of course. The tendrils of fog stretched high above his head to form a slate grey canopy, perhaps deep enough the fill the miles of sky between him and the edge of the atmosphere. Or maybe only a few inches thick, just enough to blindfold him in a perfect bubble of solitude.

It didn’t matter either way. The fog tried to trick him into believing the Tundra was his whole world, but high above his head the stars shone down on him as they had long before he existed even as a concept, and would continue to long after the distant memory of him faded. He’d never _known_ anything so deeply before, but he knew the fog could never truly block out the stars. The sight of them burned into his retinas, he only had to close his eyes to the fog to see their piercing light again.

He couldn’t hear the ocean anymore, but that was okay too. He knew how quiet the waters could be when the waves stilled, undisturbed except for when the ship ploughed forward and sent ripples of white foam through the calm blue. If he stretched his imagination, he could hear the roar of a storm a thousand kilometres from where he lay sprawled out on the deck.

The Lonely whispered that he was all alone on this ship. No crew, no ties to the land. Nothing to alleviate the maddening isolation except the all-consuming numbness. He knew he was supposed to let it in, remembered in a distant sort of way that this was what he signed up for. To let the Loneliness eat away at his thoughts and hollow him out until the mist that filled him with every breath was all that remained to hold him upright.

Martin couldn’t remember why it once mattered to him so much. Staring up at the terrifying enormity of creation and knowing with complete, despairing certainty that nothing would ever care enough to stare back, he wondered why _anything_ had ever mattered to him.

His fingers twitched, and with some surprise he realised they were still curled around a notebook. Pages of futile attempts at capturing such a sight when the words didn’t exist to encompass all they were. Scratches at a door so large he couldn’t even find its edge.

Except…he wrote about something else before he turned his gaze to the endless sky and sea. Someone in a hospital bed, asleep in another world and unreachable in every way that mattered. Separated by death and miles and a curtain of fog, how could he be naïve enough to even _dream_ of reaching him again?

Martin stared at the stars he couldn’t see. Stars he could spend a thousand years trying to reach without ever getting close, yet the distance made them no less dazzling to behold.

Somewhere in a hospital in London, Jon dreamed even in death. A world away, perhaps, but somehow they both lay beneath the same sky, and at once Martin understood what he had to do.

The fog, though dense and suffocating, wasn’t heavy enough to keep him pinned to the deck. It blinded him, but he didn’t need to see with the sound of the waves roaring in his ears. His outstretched hands met cold metal, and though he couldn’t see it, he didn’t hesitate to throw himself over the railing.

The tendrils tried to grip him tighter, but the dizzying rush of falling jolted him free of its choking numbness. Wind whipped his face, stealing the air from his lungs until not even the mist could take hold there. The fall lasted longer than it should have, but beneath him waves crashed in a steady rhythm, in perfect time with his pounding heartbeat. Time lost all meaning in the stretch between the deck and the water, and though the fog filled the air he fell through, it could not touch him with the adrenaline burning in his veins.

At last he hit the water, plunging through the surface, and sinking like a stone. It was dark without the pale glow of the fog, but the dark didn’t scare Martin so much as the depths it concealed. He sank deeper and deeper, though he could no longer tell which way was up. It swallowed him, all-encompassing no matter which way he twisted.

Perhaps he wasn’t sinking at all anymore, only floating as the endless black consumed him on all sides.

Empty lungs filled with water, robbing him of the ability to voice the scream begging to be released from his throat.

He flailed and kicked, though he knew there was nothing in the depths to reach for. He’d been swallowed by something far greater than the fog encircling the Tundra. Something bigger and more terrible than it could ever aspire to be, bathed in a dazzling beauty its creeping tendrils couldn’t touch.

Martin closed his eyes as a different kind of numbness washed over him. One that buzzed, alive with a terror so intense his mind could only process it as serenity. Instead of darkness, a billion pinpricks of light filled the endless space around him.

_Not empty_ , he realised as his silent scream relaxed into a smile of acceptance. _Just **vast**_.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _In a world impossibly far removed from the one Martin occupied, the crew of the Tundra pretended they were alone in their solitude as they rowed their little lifeboat out of reach of the Forsaken’s hungry grasp. They said nothing, staring at their shoes, and pretended they were deaf to a sound far more horrifying than the mournful wails they’d become accustomed to. The laughter echoed long after the distant splash, more haunting than any scream they could have imagined._
> 
> _It was a long time before the crew dared return to their vessel. To the relief of everyone aboard, they found it completely and undeniably empty._
> 
> **CONTENT WARNINGS:**  
>  Heavy descriptions of isolation and vast-typical explorations of existentialism. I tried not to get too heavily into the concept of suicide but at the end of this chapter Martin does fully submit to the Vast by throwing himself into the ocean to escape the clutches of the Lonely. I leaned a bit on the descriptions both Simon Fairchild and Mike Crew give of how they became avatars of the Vast, and it seemed kind of innevitable that he hurl himself into the ocean by the end of this. While he doesn't actually _die_ it is possible this may come a little too close for comfort.  
> If any of these things sound like potential triggers, I strongly recommend giving this fic a pass. Also if anybody feels like there's anything I should add, please don't hesitate to give me a shout.
> 
> Sorry this chapter wound up being pretty much all Martin but we will be getting some more of the archive gang (including Jon) in the second half. Hope you folks enjoyed!


	2. The Stars Lean Down To Kiss You

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Martin and Jon are separated and reunited (and separated and reunited).

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I promise Martin and Jon actually get to talk in this chapter.

The Institute staff didn’t need the powers of near omniscience granted to their boss to understand there was something very, _very_ wrong with this situation.

Martin Blackwood, assumed by most to be dead after over a month of radio silence, left a trail of water droplets behind him as he strolled through reception. The sight of him left many turning towards the windows with puzzled frowns, expecting to find the weather had shifted to a torrential downpour, but instead were met with a bright and endless blue.

Not a cloud in sight, and no predictions of rain until the end of the week, yet fat water droplets continued to roll off of him as if he’d just emerged from a pool fully clothed. Soaking through his jacket and the shirt on display beneath it, plastering his hair to his scalp and dripping into his eyes.

None of this seemed to faze him in the slightest as he made a beeline for the stairwell. The admittedly quiet reception area fell silent, every head turning to watch him go, but if he noticed at all he made a point of ignoring them.

Instead of descending into the archives, Martin began to climb.

Unrushed, he made his way to the top floor, his trainers squeaking on every step. His hands didn’t shake, his breath didn’t falter. His heart, if it beat at all, remained quiet in his chest as he reached the top floor. In fact, for the first time in his life, he didn’t hesitate at all before barrelling through the door at the end of the hall into the office which once belonged to Elias, and now belonged to Peter Lukas.

It was empty when he entered, but it didn’t stay that way for long.

“Oh,” Peter said from the chair behind the desk, as if he’d been there all along.

(Except it still _felt_ empty and would still _be_ empty when he left. Such a trivial paradox now, though it once hurt his head to think about.)

“Oh,” he echoed, because in truth he didn’t know what else to say. It was wrong, he _knew_ it was wrong. Peter sent Martin to the Tundra to learn what it truly meant to be Lonely. He was never meant to fall in love with the stars…but when had anything in Martin’s life ever gone according to plan?

They stared at one another until Martin turned on his heel and marched back out of the empty office. As he descended back down the stairs, an employee he recognised from research practically flattened themself against the wall to get out of his way, and he almost surprised himself by smiling at them.

When was the last time he’d _smiled?_

Once he started, he couldn’t seem to stop. Couldn’t find it in him to _want_ to stop, even if it made him look all the more insane to his clueless co-workers. Their stares would have made him want to die of embarrassment not so long ago, but he forgot their faces as soon as he lost sight of them. If there was judgement in their eyes, he passed too quick to catch it.

Somewhere on the way down, his shoes stopped squelching against the tiles. Because he’d finally wrung the water from the soles, or because his feet hardly seemed to skim the floor. It might have bothered him if he’d noticed the change, but his mind still spun with the enormity of his recent revelation.

He jumped the last few steps, laughing as he landed lightly on his feet and all but skipped down the hall to the breakroom.

“Morning Melanie!” he said chipperly, hardly noticing when she almost dropped her coffee mug in surprise. She cursed, free hand already darting towards the knife in her belt, but he passed her before she could consider using it against him.

“Martin?” Basira asked, half in surprise and half in alarm. His heart gave a painful twinge when he spotted the tape recorder balanced on her knee, a box of uncatalogued cassettes at her elbow. “I thought you weren’t coming back for another month.”

He hummed in agreement, frowning when he set eyes on his barren desk. Did they clear it after he left? Did _he_ clear it before he left? “Change of plans.”

“…Are you alright?”

“I’m fine. Great, actually. I just…needed the space to figure out what’s really important. Hey, you didn’t throw out the spare clothes I used to keep in storage, did you?”

Basira stared at him as if he’d completely lost his mind, but Martin couldn’t bring himself to mind.

“As…far as I know they’re still there.”

“Great!”

He disappeared through the door before anyone could say another word, still grinning from ear to ear.

“He’s lost it,” Melanie stage-whispered. Staring at the open door where they could now hear the sounds of boxes being moved around, Basira couldn’t find the words to argue.

xxx

Martin was different, and Martin was the same. The newfound confidence in his stride and posture raised a few eyebrows, but he still bumped into tables and tripped on the loose corner of carpet by Jon’s office door. Even if his landings sounded lighter, and he rose to his feet with a laugh instead of a curse, he was still _Martin_.

The easy smile wasn’t new, even if it felt unfamiliar after months of burying his head in his sorrows. Without the constant press of the Lonely, some of the colour began to return to his cheeks. Working in the Archives, he’d never be _tanned_ , but he lost the deathly pallor that often earned him looks of concern from the Institute staff. After a time, his watery blue eyes regained some of the depth washed out by the tears shed in his grief.

The grief never changed, of course. The oceans were larger than most would ever fully comprehend, but even the billions (trillions?) of litres of water couldn’t drown out the ever-present ache of loss. So small in the grand scheme, yet no less raw when he passed Jon’s closed office door every morning.

Melanie and Basira gave him a wide berth, wary of a change they didn’t fully understand, but neither gave any indication they planned to kill him. On occasion they’d file statements or take a stab at organising a filing cabinet, but for the most part they simply passed the time. Waiting for the other shoe to drop, as all of them knew it someday would.

In the end, it wasn’t Melanie who snapped. Nor did Basira make the first cautious and pre-emptive move. The Flesh attacked without warning or justification, all blood and twisting viscera and so inherently _wrong_. The disgust resonated in Martin on a level even Prentiss never touched, because now he understood there could never be a more breath-taking colour than blue.

The beings that stormed the Archives were already enthralled with the messy splash of red, revelling in the abnormality of their own gore. Bones cracked and bodies contorted in ways the human form was never meant to, but the backwards joints and torn open rib cages couldn’t disturb him as much as the knowledge that they _chose_ this. With the sky as their witness, they directed their awe towards their own disfigurement. Like children finger painting on the floor of the Sistine Chapel, arrogant enough to hold their creations up for praise as if the two could _ever_ be compared.

It took him by surprise. A takeaway cup in each hand and a wrapped sandwich from the cafeteria wedged under his arm, the last thing he expected to face when he reached the bottom of the stairs was the sight of carnage.

The thing that turned to face him couldn’t be described as human. Not by any stretch of even Martin’s overactive imagination. Too many limbs, too long and many-jointed to resemble any animal he’d ever seen, yet still it managed to bend in a direction his brain recognised as being _wrong_.

He froze, shock and terror paralysing him in place while the thing stalked forward. Somewhere in the mess of torn flesh it must have had something resembling a face, because it smiled when it closed the gap between them. In the end, it was the breath that forced him from his daze. Hot and rancid against his skin, the pieces clicked into place in his head.

Beneath the terror, anger began to rear its ugly head.

Jagged spines that may have once been rib bones arched beneath a thin stretch of skin and threatened to close around him like teeth, but instead of scrambling backwards, he took a step forward. Into the thing that now seemed more like a jaw than a body, hands reaching past the sharp edges of wet flesh to _push_.

It shouldn’t have worked. There were too many limbs for it too overbalance so easily, too much muscle beneath its shifting skin to be forced back by Martin’s meagre strength, but it fell all the same.

Basira rounded the corner, gun in hand and already trained on the thing cornering him by the door…only to watch in alarm as it tumbled backwards.

No, not backwards, _down_. There was hardly any force behind the shove, but at once its sharp legs began to scramble for purchase on a ground that refused to hold them up.

It reshaped its mangled vocal cords in time to let out a scream before it hit the ground with…a splash?

Martin could still see the carpet, even if his mind insisted it _couldn’t be there_ , the creature of flesh flailing as it plunged beneath the surface of the water that should have been a floor. Stretching its contorted limbs to reach for the walls, for Martin, for _something_ it could hold onto, but at once they all seemed impossibly far beyond its reach. The weight of its own abominable body dragged it down into the incomprehensible depths hidden beneath the plain grey carpet, now streaked with red from the Flesh’s brief incursion.

The pair could only stare at the innocent patch of carpet where the creature disappeared, bewildered as the smell of salt rushed in to replace the rusty stench of congealing blood and uncooked meat.

“…Martin?” Basira asked cautiously. Cautious of _him_. “What…just happened?”

“I can explain,” he blurted out. It didn’t occur to him until after the words left his mouth that he might not have the clear, concise answers Basira wanted.

A jarring creak heralded the arrival of an unwelcome addition, though Martin couldn’t remember seeing the door appear on the wall in his peripheral. A pair of large, bottomless eyes peered around the lip of the obnoxious yellow door, alight with a dangerous and sickening excitement.

“Oh, Martin,” Helen breathed. “And to think, I used to think you were the _boring_ one around here.”

Martin could only groan and tried to ignore the strange sense of satisfaction settling in his stomach, as if from overindulging in a well-cooked meal.

xxx

Unsurprisingly, throwing a flesh-monster into a weird ocean portal in the floor didn’t help his already complicated relationship with his co-workers. Basira kept a closer eye on him after that, scrutinising every subtle shift in his character as if trying to get a sense of how different he really was.

What surprised him more than anything was how little he _cared_.

Martin left the Institute practically skipping, head tipped back to relish in the first drops of rain. The light pollution blotted out so many of the constellations he’d fallen in love with on the Tundra, but the night sky still kept him company on the long walks home. Something about the underground seemed unbearably stifling these days, but his muscles never ached in protest over the long commute.

It was hard to care about something so trivial as an opinion, he reflected, when faced with a glimpse of something so breathtakingly beautiful as the sky.

He toyed with lines of poetry, trying to find the words to capture its magnificence on the page. There were plenty of words to choose from, a hundred thousand variations to describe the nuances of the sight painted on the backs of his eyelids. He kept to traditional poetry structures when he could, remembering the restrictions his secondary school English teacher imposed, but there were nights he just couldn’t help himself.

The night the Flesh attacked, Martin didn’t linger on the streets to admire the sky. Instead of home, his feet carried him to a still lit hospital where the visiting hours ended hours before, but no one seemed inclined to challenge his presence.

During his brief brush with the Lonely, he could think of nothing beyond the ache his absence left behind. The Lukas’ god gorged itself on his fear of losing anyone else until it grew so unbearable he could only think to separate himself from them first. The Vast, on the other hand, didn’t mind when he visited Jon in the hospital. Even if the pointlessness of it remained a sharp constant while he waited in an uncomfortable waiting room chair. Watching his eyes dart behind closed eyelids, close enough to touch and trapped a world away.

He told him about the Flesh attack, though it was more difficult than he expected without the compulsion to keep him on track and drag out _just_ the right words to paint a picture of the scene. Still, Martin couldn’t help but hope his small offering might be accepted. That it might ease any lingering hunger in Jon, as the Flesh abomination’s demise had sated his own.

When he ran out of things to say, he reached for his bag and pulled out the first of the statements he’d brought home to look over. They still needed to be recorded and catalogued, after all, and sometimes he could almost convince himself that Jon might cut in with a correction.

“ _That’s not how you pronounce it, Martin_.”

“ _You mixed up the dates again, Martin_.”

“ _You need to introduce it_ properly _, Martin._ ”

“ _Obviously that’s a manifestation of the Stranger, not the Spiral, Martin_.”

Sometimes he thought he’d let the Desolation boil the oceans if it meant Jon could lecture him again. Just once.

For all the hours Martin spent at his bedside, it was Georgie who saw it when at long last he began to stir. Georgie who called Melanie who told Basira, and by the time word filtered back down to Martin, all hell had broken loose.

He was Jon. And he was _not_ Jon.

His eyes looked greener, Martin realised the first time they met face-to-face since they all left to save the world and only one returned. His weighted gaze fell heavy on Martin’s shoulders, flaying him with its brutal intensity, and for the first time since Becoming he remembered what it was to be _ashamed_.

Jon’s wide, curious eyes darkened with a sorrow Martin knew all too well. Grief and pity and pain and regret he couldn’t help but look away from.

“Oh, Martin,” he said, voice flat and hollow as he scoured him with a burning intensity.

Far from the heartfelt reunion Martin had envisioned, but he could tolerate the disappointment. He swallowed back the confessions he let slip so many times at Jon’s hospital bed and forced himself instead to smile.

“It’s good to have you back,” he said, though his own eyes remained distant when their gaze met again.

_It’s inconsequential_ , he reminded himself. Something so easily recalled in the company of the others, a fact pulled around him as tight and protective as any armour.

He didn’t believe it.

xxx

“Basira,” Martin said, his voice shaking with the effort. “ _Where is Jon?_ ”

Slowly, deliberately, her eyes drifted back towards the coffin.

She didn’t say a word. She didn’t _need_ to. One look at the chains lying in a heap on the floor beside that awful wooden tomb and he knew.

To her credit, Basira stayed by his side as he wept at the foot of the coffin. Ready to pull him back if he ever gave in to its haunting call. Tears splattered against the lid, soaking into the pale timber and staining it with salt, but otherwise he left it untouched.

He didn’t move for a very long time.

xxx

Martin wasn’t there the day Jon woke up from his coma, in spite of the countless hours spent sitting in that uncomfortable chair at his bedside and the pointless attempts at making conversation. No matter how many statements he read, or how terrible his choice in novels, Jon never moved a muscle.

It shouldn’t have mattered, but Martin’s memories of what happened after he left the Tundra were blurred and waterlogged. Terror and awe and euphoria and sorrow bleeding together like ink on a page until he couldn’t distinguish up from down. Jon’s resurrection was more…sensible from what he’d heard. He woke up to familiar faces, a statement pushed into his hands to bring the world back into focus. A free ride back to his Archives, his _Domain_.

It shouldn’t have mattered that Martin couldn’t be there for him the first time, but it did. And he’d be damned if he missed the second.

So, he waited.

And waited.

And waited.

“You have to leave the Archive sometime, Martin.”

“Do I?”

“You can’t live the rest of your life draped over that damn thing.”

“I wouldn’t _have_ to if you’d put a stop to his whole suicide mission.”

“He’s a grown man.”

“He fed himself to a _coffin_.”

Basira pursed her lips but didn’t comment.

“Besides, it’s not for my whole life, is it? Just until he comes back.”

“…Right.”

He could hear the doubt in her voice. Hell, he could hear the doubt in his _own_. Instead of arguing, Basira left him alone in the office again and returned an hour later with a bag from the Chinese takeaway down the street. Neither spoke as she sat down on the floor beside him, their backs pressed flush against the wall with the coffin at their feet.

“Aren’t you worried about it luring you inside?” she asked after a comfortable lull, with the takeaway boxes open between them and the smell of sweet and sour chicken to ease the tension.

Martin didn’t have to consider his answer.

“No.”

“How come?”

“It’s…repulsive. Literally. I’m not sure I could bring myself to go inside it if I wanted to.”

“ _Do_ you want to?”

Martin stared at the coffin rather than meeting Basira’s eye. Tried to imagine pulling back the lid and cramming himself into the tight space it concealed. Crawling down until he forgot the meaning of up, until the endless tonnes of rock and soil buried the sky itself.

It took everything he had not to gag.

“If I thought it would bring them back…maybe,” he admitted.

Basira looked thoughtful as she skewered a lumpy piece of chicken on her fork.

“Would it?”

“I doubt I’d have any more luck getting out of there than Jon.”

She hummed, dissatisfied but unsurprised. “I guess we’re both stuck here waiting, then.”

Not for the first time, Martin wondered what she heard when she stood too close to the unchained lid. If it was the promise of Daisy that called to her, louder even than the call of pressure and closeness and soil. What mental gymnastics did it take for her to convince herself to resist?

He breathed in and almost choked on the dust catching in his throat, threatening to suffocate him. She offered him a bottle of water and he gulped it down gratefully, but it tasted too clean. Too _plastic_. He licked his lips to bring back the taste of salt and glared at the coffin.

“Yeah,” he bit out. “I guess we are.”

xxx

Martin took every imaginable step to ensure he would be there when Jon emerged from the coffin. The waning urges to eat or sleep aided his efforts, though the evident reminder of his association with the entities put Melanie and Basira on edge. A few months ago he likely would have lost his mind with boredom, but these days he found it much easier to lose himself in his own thoughts. Days rolled past without his notice, grains of sand in the hourglass while his mind churned.

He filled his notebook with half-finished verses and passing thoughts, unconcerned by the notion that all his efforts might be wasted. All the while, the coffin sang. Every note a razor sharp edge against his salt-soaked skin. More than ever he missed the open water, and somehow he knew that even on foot he could reach the beach before nightfall.

The space between him and the water’s edge was meaningless; the only thing standing between him and an endless ocean of stars where the sky met the sea was his own resolve.

Martin held his vigil with unparalleled dedication, subjecting himself to the dust and the stench of the rancid earth while the sky waited patiently for his return.

The urge that drove him to the statements started small, a gnawing urge easily drowned out by the song of the soil and the roar of ocean waves. That shrunken, withered corner of him Beholding carved out long before the Vast swept in, dormant after so many months at sea but now awake with a desperate longing. It clawed at the walls of his mind, and the noise of the Vast and the Buried’s heated standoff couldn’t overpower the oppressive weight of its gaze.

He collected the statements without fully understanding why, placing his trust in the hands of the dread power Jon hadn’t chosen but served faithfully, nonetheless. It might have felt like a betrayal had his loyalties still been with the Forsaken, but the Vast was not a jealous domain. Martin buried the coffin in tape recorders, and when it still didn’t satiate the Watcher’s hungry gaze, he dug out paper statements to lend his own voice to the unending drone.

“Martin,” Basira said with a note of finality. “This has gone far enough.”

His eyes never left the coffin, wondering absently how he even heard her over the cacophony of overlapping statements. If it came down to a confrontation, Martin suspected the odds were in his favour for once, but even the comforting draw of his newfound domain didn’t stop him from flinching when her hand landed on his shoulder.

Instead of using force, she guided him out of the office as one might lead a distraught child by the hand. Martin had left the office before, of course, but the stale air of the archives seemed to drown him after so much time spent in the company of that wretched, choking pit. Even hot and stuffy as it was, he fought down gasps of sweet, clean air and wondered what it must take to drive someone into the arms of such a domain.

Did avatars of the Buried take comfort in the suffocating soil as he did in the sting of salt? Crushed by their anxieties instead of casting them to the wind, crawling through the mass of that impossible weight inch by agonising inch.

Martin shuddered, for the first time truly thankful that he’d been accepted by something as freeing and cruelly apathetic as the Vast.

Basira led him into the breakroom while he struggled to remember how to breathe air untainted by dirt.

“You can’t pretend this is doing you any good.”

Martin laughed, high and borderline delirious. “Nothing _about_ this is good, Basira. Jon’s trapped in a coffin and I’m—”

The coughing fit caught him off-guard, cutting him off midsentence and refusing to relent until he’d hacked up all of the crumbling soil lining his throat. Basira only watched, attentive and calculating.

“You’re no good to Jon dead.”

_Too late for that_ , he thought bitterly thinking back to the railing and the cold, sinking weightlessness of the empty sea’s embrace.

Oh how he _longed_ to feel that weightless now.

She pressed a mug of tea into his hands, the warmth of it bringing him back to himself for a brief and treasured moment of clarity.

“I’m not sure what I’ll do if he doesn’t come back,” Martin whispered, half-mortified by his own admission.

“With any luck, you won’t have to find out. Jon’s like a bad penny that way.”

He laughed again, though this time the sound was more hollow than mad. Basira stood to retrieve her own cup.

“He’ll get out of there, Martin. They both will.”

xxx

Martin still stayed with the coffin every moment he could spare, though he tried to take Basira’s advice to heart. No one in the archives did any real work anymore, but he shuffled some papers around to create a semblance of order. Peter Lukas continued to keep his distance, as did Melanie when the call of the archives became too much to resist and she was forced to spend the day stomping around in storage. Tolerating his presence in the building seemed to be the closest she could get to acceptance, not that he could blame her after her recent brush with the Slaughter.

The ache never left him, though he tried to convince himself it was inconsequential. Surely that should be a benefit of living with the heavy weight of the universe’s unfathomable immensity on his shoulders? He should be able to take comfort in that knowledge, lose himself in the days that flitted by like the pages of a book, each one more fleeting and pointless than the last.

Instead of granting him detachment, the knowledge haunted him in the form of despair that tasted achingly familiar after his brush with the Lonely. So cold it made his teeth ache, raking across his skin like the dull edge of a blade. The universe may not care for the infinitesimal speck that was the life of Jonathan Sims, but Martin certainly did.

Perhaps it should be befitting then that he missed Jon’s second resurrection by a matter of minutes.

He didn’t even wander particularly far, just out to the shop down the road to buy more milk for the breakroom. Food too, though he couldn’t remember the last time he ate out of hunger rather than habit.

He made it halfway down the stairs to the Archives when the stench hit him. Not the old and musty smell of aging paper he’d grown so used to, but of dirt. Dry and grainy in a way that flavoured the dust motes in the air. It clawed its way down the inside of his throat to take up residence in his lungs, and when Martin choked on it he half-expected to cough up soil rather of air.

The carrier bag hit the stairs and split, its contents spilling out across the carpeted floor, but Martin didn’t stick around long enough to see where everything landed. He vaulted down the stairs at a speed he once would have found terrifying, paying no mind to where his feet landed between one leap and the next. Instead of rolling on his ankle and breaking his neck, he made it to the bottom step in the blink of an eye and took off down the hall at a sprint.

Jon’s office door was already ajar.

Basira had beaten him to it, her attention focused solely on the skeletal figure caked in dirt. A pale shadow of the looming, sneering figure who once threatened to frame Martin for murder. Who threatened to kill Elias, and Jon, and God knew what else—

Jon.

He offered Martin a weak smile, leaning on his desk to keep his trembling limbs from giving up on him entirely. There was soil stuck between his teeth, tangled in the matted clumps of his hair, on his clothes, the fine grains of sand worked into the contours of his skin. Marking its claim on him, even after Basira slammed shut the coffin lid and scrambled to replace the padlock.

The sight sparked a strange and visceral reaction. Something born of jealousy and feverish _need_. To shelter him from the crushing weight he seemed so determined to take upon his shoulders, to erase any trace of the awful dirt so antithetical to everything he was and is and _chose to be_ —

Jon’s eyes widened in surprise rather than alarm when Martin closed the space between them, making no effort to move away when he threw his arms around his neck. The force of his tackling hug knocked him off balance, but Martin normally would have been able to keep him upright.

Except Jon’s foot didn’t hit solid ground when he shuffled back a step. It plunged down and down and down without end, and in his panic it was all he could do to grab a fistful of Martin’s sweater before the pair overbalanced.

He should have fallen back against the desk, or else Jon should have cracked his skull against the wall. The office wasn’t large, but in that moment their surroundings seemed impossibly out of reach. Martin didn’t even bother to take a breath before they crashed through the still surface of the water and sank like stones, sending ripples of saltwater rolling out across the beige coloured carpet.

He caught a glimpse of Basira and Daisy’s twin expressions of horror before they vanished from sight. Before _everything_ vanished from sight. They may have continued to sink, or perhaps they floated as a single point of stillness in the endless inky back. Jon scrambled frantically for better purchase on his jumper, desperate not to lose his sole connection to reality in this strange and alien abyss, but already Martin knew he wouldn’t lose Jon here.

Not if he didn’t _want_ to.

Squeezing his shoulder in what he hoped would be perceived as a reassuring gesture, Martin kicked his legs and thought of _Up_. Jon’s heart still raced in his chest, its frantic hammering palpable in their embrace. Desperate and blind and _terrified_ , and all because Martin couldn’t hug someone without the endless expanse rising up to drown them.

He tried to think about the statements of cloudless blue skies, but his own memories of the ocean in the daytime were washed in a haze of fog. The water remained stubbornly dark.

Instead, he cast his mind around for another memory. Sunrise breaking over the horizon line, splitting the seam of ocean and sky and painting both in a wash of vibrant colour that even the fog couldn’t touch.

At once a smattering of stars winked into existence, pinpricks of light blossoming across a canvas of solid black. He thought of _Up_ again, and this time instead of kicking he _tugged_.

Their heads broke the surface where before there had been only darkness, the cold air biting against their salt soaked skin, and in his arms Jon sucked in a ragged breath. Beneath them the water began to shift, no longer dragging them down into the inky black, but pushing them _Up_.

They floated. Lifted in a way that surface tension alone couldn’t account for, made so effortlessly buoyant by the eager waves it reduced the thought of sinking to a distant impossibility. While Jon fought for the ability to once again form words, a thousand apologies stumbled from Martin’s lips.

“I’m sorry! I really didn’t mean to— _Christ_ , you only just got out of the Buried! You were just— I _promise_ I wouldn’t have if I’d known. You _have_ to believe me, Jon, I really never meant for this to happen. I’ll get a better hold on this, really. I didn’t…I wasn’t actually sure this could _happen_. Not really. I mean, I sent one of those Flesh monsters into it once but— Oh God, you don’t think they’re still _here_ , do you? You know what? Forget I said that. Best not to think about it too hard, just in case. _Thinking_ does seem to be what’s getting me into—”

“Martin,” Jon rasped, and at once he fell silent. “It’s _okay_. I know.”

“You…You know _,_ or you _Know?_ ”

Jon gave up on trying to disguise his exhaustion and let his head drop to Martin’s chest, his heart still beating a brisk staccato rhythm in his chest.

“It’s okay,” he said again, his voice still rough from days spent in the dirt. No moisture, no air, no _room_. Martin shuddered at the thought. “It just surprised me. After the Buried it’s…it’s a lot.”

“Understatement,” Martin said, casting his eyes upwards. More stars appeared to join that sparse smattering, trailing across the sky in the familiar formations he spent so many hours committing to memory.

Eventually he gave in and leaned back, trusting the gentle waves to hold him upright. They lapped lovingly against the pair, reminding him kindly of how easy it would be to sink until he forgot such a skewed and subjective concept as _direction_ existed at all.

He made a point not to mention that aloud.

“Can you get us out again?” Jon asked, so soft and hesitant that the rush of the water almost swallowed the words completely.

“Right, sorry. It’s hard to keep my thoughts straight in here.”

Jon’s hand found his, their fingers lacing together with a reassuring squeeze. “We could stay a while.”

Martin swallowed thickly, feeling the saltwater purge the last of the dusty soil from his lungs. “Yeah?”

“I’ve been dreaming of taking a shower for three days,” he said. “This is better.”

Martin heard himself laugh. The sound bounced off the skin of the water, its echo carrying on and on and on andonandonandonandonand—

“I don’t think I’ve ever gotten far enough away from the city to see the stars this clearly.”

Martin’s head swivelled to stare at him, though Jon couldn’t tear his gaze away from the sky long enough to notice. Eyes wide, but still not wide enough to soak in every detail of the boundaryless expanse.

Jon didn’t trust the water to keep him afloat just yet, hands still bunched in Martin’s sweater as if clutching a lifeline, but bit by bit his curiosity pushed the panic and fear to the wayside.

“I didn’t see the sky until the Tundra. Not in any way that counted,” he admitted, marvelling over how well he could see Jon in what should have been complete darkness. No artificial lights to illuminate his face, no sun peaking over the edge of the world. Not even a moon, he noted with a frown.

The stars more than compensated for its absence, picking out every strand of grey peppering Jon’s temples and painting them a shining silver. At the mention of his time aboard the Tundra, Jon dared to give his hand another squeeze. “Did you travel south?”

“Er, I’m not sure,” he said, cheeks growing hot despite the bite of the caressing breeze. “Why?”

“I…I can’t be certain, but I think that’s _Centaurus_ ,” he said, gesturing vaguely to a patch of sky above their heads. “If I’m right, that would make that line of stars beside it the back of _Scorpius_ , with _Lupus_ positioned right between them.”

“Oh.”

“But that _can’t_ be right,” he argued. “Because I _Know_ that’s _Canis Major_. _Orion_ I can just about make sense of but…How can we be seeing _Carina_ at the same time as _Cassiopeia?_ And—”

Jon halted when at last he tore his eyes away from the sky long enough to catch a glimpse of Martin’s face, his look of indignation quickly smoothing out into something more neutral. Almost _self-conscious_.

“Don’t stop on my account,” he said with a grin, and the stars blazed a little brighter overhead.

“You can’t fit this many constellations under one sky,” Jon maintained stubbornly. “Not without…without _cramming_ them together, but the distances all match up to what I remember. I _Know_ what I’m seeing is real but it’s…It’s impossible.”

“Jon, you just crawled out of a bottomless coffin after spending six months in a hospital bed with no heartbeat.”

“Fair point. How much control do you have over this place? I’ve always wondered…”

“I don’t think it’s about control so much as… _tuning_.”

“Hmm.”

“What?”

“Nothing. Just a bit disappointing, is all. I suppose it’s still reassuring to know the other Avatars don’t all have the Distortion’s level of control over their domains.”

“Disappointing,” Martin parroted with a teasing edge. “You _are_ a hard one to impress. A whole world of constellations laid out for you under a single sky isn’t good enough for you?”

Jon laughed into his shoulder until he choked on the dust still clinging to the insides of his lungs. No matter, the salt air would burn it out of him soon. “It’s beautiful, Martin. I’m just sorry I wasn’t there for you when…”

“I chose it, in the end.”

“Hardly much of a choice,” he said bitterly. “The Vast or the Lonely?”

“I did have a third option. Same as you.”

His free hand twisted in his sweater, ringing the water from the wool in his clenched fist. No doubt Martin would end up tossing it anyway when they got back, and the fabric dried stiff from the salt now baked into its very being. No amount of scrubbing would rid him of the briny sea smell now, even if he _wanted_ to.

“The End?”

“It was good enough for Tim.”

Neither one voiced the thought that flitted through their minds in unison. That Tim would likely have helped Melanie and Basira kill them both if he’d survived the Unknowing. That Melanie and Basira still _might_.

Jon shifted, upsetting the distribution of their weight, and forcing the waves to compensate. He froze as they teetered, like a child scolded for rocking the canoe, only allowing himself to relax when the waters smoothed out and resumed their gentle rocking.

“How many constellations do you know?” he asked. Relieved for the distraction, Martin latched on to this change in topic with both hands.

“Er, I dunno. The main ones I guess?” Funny how the names never mattered to him before now.

“I used to have a book on them as a kid,” Jon said matter-of-factly. “Was never very good at identifying them, though. Now I _Know_ them all.”

“Beholding likes star gazing?”

“Beholding likes knowing things,” Jon corrected. “And space is a common theme in a number of statements.”

“Do you have a favourite?”

Jon pondered, his eyes flitting skyward. They shone a little too bright in the starlight, pulsing green as he strained to See.

“Scorpius,” he decided, and Martin snorted.

“Figures.”

“Alright, what’s _your_ favourite?”

Martin squinted up at the sky, racking his brains for a name. “The plough.”

“Interesting.”

“My mum pointed it out to me once,” he said, the ripples from his shrug cutting through the gentle peaks of the waves.

“You know it’s only a smaller part of a larger constellation?”

“Mmm?”

“Ursa Major. The great bear.”

“Oh. Where’s the little bear, then?”

“Right there,” he said, releasing Martin’s hand to point out a patch of sky. “You see?”

He squinted. “Doesn’t really look like a bear.”

“It’s named after a myth. Or rather, it’s a _part_ of a myth.”

Martin watched with fondness as Jon’s eyes blazed ever brighter. Soaking in the sight while his god fed him back fragments of information.

“Can you tell me the story?”

Jon looked sceptical, brow furrowing in a way deeply reminiscent of when he took a particularly outlandish statement.

“Unless you want to go,” Martin offered. “I’m…I’m still getting the handle of this, but I’m pretty sure we can slip back out easily enough now everything’s settled.”

Jon wavered, caught between Martin and the impossible starry sky.

“It’s not a long story,” he said slowly, offering no complaint when Martin found his hand again. Their fingers slotted together so neatly, his palm fitting into that uneven dip where Jude Perry burned through the layers of flesh until she hit bone.

He wondered if Jude had any strong opinions on the ocean.

“I’m sure Basira and Daisy will wait.”

Jon smiled, leaning into Martin’s chest and turning his gaze skyward once more.

“It begins with a nymph named Callisto…”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for sticking around for the ride, folks! I suspect this chapter wound up quite disjointed but it was fun experimenting with my favourite entity all the same. I really need to stop writing flowery prose at 2 in the morning.


End file.
